A three-judge US Court of Appeals panel has denied Google's request to toss out another judge's decision to allow an incriminating email from being used as evidence in Oracle's Java-patent lawsuit against Mountain View.

Adobe has released beta code for sandboxing its heavily hacked Flash code within Firefox, in a similar fashion to the Chrome security protections added to its Reader software and Google’s Chrome browser.

The fragile European consensus over the ACTA treaty is fraying at the fringes: the Czech Republic and Slovakia have decided to suspend the ratification process, while Romania’s support for the treaty could stall on a change of government.

The true audiophile is likely to have many questions concerning the Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi, but chief among them is likely to be ‘How f*%&ing much??!?’ At £549 this Chinese-made high fidelity portable music player is nobody’s idea of a bargain, but if you’re one of those brave souls who still cares about sound quality, who appreciates the convenience of digital but feels cheated by the compressed sound, Colorfly might just have something here.

The security or lack thereof of the Android platform - real or imagined - is a common topic of conversation at the moment so it seems like a good time to take a look for a comprehensive security app. My preferred choice is Avast!.

HTC could be in for a spot of bother in 2012 after its Q1 outlook missed analysts’ estimates. Commentators suggest the firm may struggle to compete with Apple, Samsung and the wealth of handset manufacturers crowding this increasingly competitive space.

Every now and again, a brand new product comes along that seems to hark back to days of yore, to a time when things were different. One of those things would be the steam-powered PC, another is the ViewSonic V350 – a smartphone that can work on two networks simultaneously.

Hacktivists affiliated with Anonymous uploaded what they claim is the source code of Symantec's pcAnywhere software early on Tuesday, following the breakdown of negotiations between the hacking group and "a federal agent posing as a Symantec employee".

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has had to walk back on the idea that the world's glaciers will all be gone within decades due to human-caused carbon powered global warming: but news has now emerged showing that in at least one case human action has absolutely indisputably led to the disappearance of large chunks of glacier.

Scores of IT suppliers and consultancy firms have made it onto the G-Cloud framework, but government officials are keeping schtum about the names and numbers until a two-week cooling off period passes.

Google is actually working on twitch-responsive sci-fi-style head-up display glasses, according to a report by 9TO5Google. And the new tech apparently includes a cursor that responds to head movements.

Mozilla coders are arguing among themselves about the open-source outfit's Metrics Data Ping project, which was designed to monitor Firefox usage metrics. Several coders in the Mozilla camp have expressed concern about how some developers are proposing the project should collect data from users of the browser.

As the IT world scrambles pell mell into the cloud, veteran vendors like Oracle are having to figure out how to make money in an IT market that is increasingly turning its back on traditional software licensing. While Oracle has faced down challenges to its core database business before from open source, the cloud presents an even thornier problem. If the world wants NoSQL and its ilk, will Oracle be forced to capitulate?

A Chinese trademark-infringement case against Apple's right to use the name "iPad" that has been rumbling along since October 2010 has taken another turn: the Shenzhen company involved in the imbroglio now wants Cupertino to be levied a $38m fine – and it wants an apology.

Xeround, a startup with experience in making scalable database management systems for telcos and service providers, vaulted itself into the cloudy database business last June with the launch of its eponymous database service running atop Amazon's EC2 service. Now it is tweaking the product's packaging and pricing to make it more appealing to a larger number of customers.

Server juggernaut Hewlett-Packard is hosting a shindig in Las Vegas next week with the bigwigs in its server unit, and the speculation is that the company will preview its forthcoming ProLiant G8 servers sporting Intel's "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors.

Mars has given nuclear spacecraft engines a new lease on life, with nuke ships being named as a top priority – along with electrical propulsion – in a new report that recommends what NASA should focus on in coming years.

If VMware wants service providers to dump Xen and KVM hypervisors, it has to make the job of using the VMware stack easier than the hodgepodge of usually hand-crafted tools that service providers employ and that, to a certain extent, give them their competitive advantage. Or, perhaps in some cases, a competitive disadvantage. So VMware has cooked up a special uber-controller aimed specifically at service providers, called vCloud Integration Manager.

The contrast between Apple's prestige city-centre stores and the Sam's Club warehouse chain – where budget goods are sold straight from the pallet – is sharp. But that's where Apple wants to set up mini stores to sell its gadgets.